Webinars

Indoor carbon dioxide concentrations have been measured and discussed in the context of building ventilation and indoor air quality (IAQ) for more than 100 years. In recent decades they have been proposed as an easy way to evaluate the adequacy of ventilation, even to estimate ventilation rates, as well as an indicator of IAQ. Many of these proposals and applications of CO2 have been technically incomplete if not wrong. The application of indoor CO2 concentrations, as well as their misinterpretation, has increased in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A series of Ventilation Information Papers (VIPs) is being developed and published by the AIVC to present national trends and regulations on building and ductwork airtightness. This webinar will explore the building and ductwork airtightness practices in three countries: China, New Zealand, and Japan. Each nation represents a unique regulatory and construction environment, shaped by distinct climate conditions, national policies, and building practices.

As it is now a well-known fact that air leakage can significantly impact the building energy performance, more and more countries are introducing requirements or recommendations on new buildings’ airtightness level in their energy performance regulation. One key aspect to encourage good practice and good airtightness levels in new or retrofitted buildings is to properly include the air infiltration impact in the EP calculation.

Personal Environmental Control System (PECS) with the functions of heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting and acoustic has advantages of controlling the localized environment at occupant’s workstation by their preference instead of conditioning an entire room. This improves personal comfort, health and energy efficiency of the entire heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system substantially. Personalized ventilation will also provide improved protection against cross contaminations, which are critical in open plan offices and workplaces with close distance.

Occupants use windows to control their thermal comfort and indoor air quality (IAQ). However, occupants often have to make a compromise between thermal, acoustic and visual comfort, IAQ and energy use for space conditioning. Moreover, they are not only looking for good indoor environmental quality, but also for their needs for security and privacy.

Ventilative cooling emerges to be a key element in the strategy to meet the cooling demand in buildings while cutting the CO2 emissions. Ventilative cooling also enhances thermal comfort and mitigates heat stress in buildings. Despite these benefits, the practical adoption of ventilative cooling remains limited among designers. There is still a need for design guidelines and assessment methods in standard weather conditions, extreme scenarios (such as heat waves) and urban environments.

In the context of energy use reduction, low energy buildings are becoming more widespread. This kind of construction requires a good envelope airtightness to prevent uncontrolled leakages of conditioned air leading to energy losses. As a result, more and more ventilation systems are installed to ensure a sufficient air change rate, to guarantee good indoor air quality and building durability while controlling energy losses.

In this webinar, we addressed the opportunities offered by smart ventilation strategies, which include a wide range of systems depending on the type of sensing parameters (CO₂, humidity, occupancy, etc.), the type of sensing combinations, the type of installation (centralized/decentralized), the types of control algorithms, etc. We will also quantify their potential from and energy and IAQ point of view based on existing and newly developed assessment framework in the annex.

In this webinar, we addressed the opportunities to use novel materials (from advanced functional nano-materials to bio-based building materials) as building components to actively/passively manage the IAQ, for example, through active paint, wallboards, and textiles coated with advanced sorbents or catalysts and quantify their potential, based on the assessment framework developed in the IEA EBC Annex 86 “Energy Efficient Indoor Air Quality Management in Residential Buildings”.

Air infiltration in buildings has multiple consequences on energy use and indoor environmental quality. Therefore, in the last 10 years many countries have introduced requirements for building airtightness in their EP-regulation. Those requirements often prescribe that a test is performed by a qualified tester and that every test performed is recorded in a database.  Hundreds of thousands of data are now available in Europe.